I Pay for News; Why Do I Still See Intrusive Ads? (2017)

The answer may not be pleasing, but it's true: because "paid subscribers" represent a valuable advertising demographic/segment. They are nearly certain you are human traffic, and you have enough disposable income that you pay for news.

This seems to be a re-occuring pattern: have ads on a free&#x2F;cheap service, introduce a paid service, place ads on the paid service, then hope if you hold out long enough people will forget there was a time when your paid service was ad free.<p>Prime example: Cable tv<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;1981&#x2F;07&#x2F;26&#x2F;arts&#x2F;will-cable-tv-be-invaded-by-commercials.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;1981&#x2F;07&#x2F;26&#x2F;arts&#x2F;will-cable-tv-be-inv...</a>

If you&#x27;re a subscriber, you&#x27;re the most valuable advertising target. You&#x27;ve shown a willingness to pay for stuff on the internet. Furthermore, advertisers are targeting people who read those publications regularly. Subscribers are those people.<p>If you wanted an ad-free subscription, it would cost substantially more than you currently pay to made up for the lost advertising revenue.

There are ads in the paper newspaper I subscribe to as well. Real reporting and quality writing don&#x27;t come cheaply, and that hasn&#x27;t changed just because the delivery method did. Probably neither the author nor I would be willing to pay for a subscription without ad subsidies.

Some numbers for perspective [1]:<p>Digital-only subscription revenue in 2017: $340 million<p>Digital advertising revenue in 2017: $238 million<p>Obviously some digital advertising is shown to print subscribers logging in too... but if we ignore that for simplicity, without ads your NYT digital subscription would be 70% more expensive.<p>At $195&#x2F;yr. for digital-only, it&#x27;s already my most expensive subscription by a significant amount. If it were 70% more, or $331.50&#x2F;yr, I imagine subscriptions would drop by a lot -- that&#x27;s a <i>lot</i> of money for news.<p>So... that&#x27;s presumably why there are still ads. Gotta pay the reporters somehow.<p>On the other hand, the New Yorker bugging you to subscribe is just lazy programming, and I hate it too.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;02&#x2F;08&#x2F;business&#x2F;new-york-times-company-earnings.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;02&#x2F;08&#x2F;business&#x2F;new-york-times-c...</a>

You know the old saw about &quot;if you don&#x27;t pay for the product, you are the product&quot;? It&#x27;s not &quot;if and only if&quot;.

They ruined any trust between advertisers and consumers through deceptive, bad faith tactics, and reduced the entire equation to pure game theory. If an advertiser can figure out how to get their ad copy past my sophisticated filtering attempts and get into my mind in a memorable way, then more power to them. Otherwise they don&#x27;t have any &quot;right&quot; to exist and make money off stealing my time and resources, both mental and compute.

I subbed to the nytimes for a single month before I realized they did not disable ads for paid subscribers. So dumb and toxic.<p>Edit: typo

It’s the problem with news websites&#x2F;magazines&#x2F;paper. They live because there are ads in it.<p>And so would they criticize companies that put a lot of cash on them ? Perhaps. May be not.<p>In France, we have a news website [0] which is totally independent, and only accessible for paying subscribers. It took them a few years and now they are earning money.<p>You might or might not agree with their editorial line, but the fact is that they can investigate any company without hesitation.<p>It’s hard, but I think it’s the only way to have an independent information.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mediapart.fr" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mediapart.fr</a>

So much for &quot;if you&#x27;re not paying you&#x27;re the product&quot;. Seems like if you&#x27;re paying, you&#x27;re still the product.

When I was young my family paid for cable TV when the rest of the neighborhood still had antennas on their roofs because pay TV didn&#x27;t have commercials.<p>Now I pay for cable TV <i>and</i> it&#x27;s jammed full of commercials.<p>The idea that free online services aren&#x27;t really free because we pay with our attention and with our data is only half true.<p>Paid online services also take our data and increasingly interrupt us with advertisements, just like cable TV.

I want to know, how much does it truly cost for the same content without ads. What would the actual pricetag be, if we built in the overhead added by advertising and marketing into the fee for the product or service itself?

&gt; Why do I still see ads?<p>Because you haven&#x27;t installed an ad blocker yet. Get uBlock Origin, enable all the filters and don&#x27;t look back.

Because not showing you ads would be &quot;leaving money on the table&quot; and that just won&#x27;t do.<p>If not showing ads wasn&#x27;t part of the deal, ads will be shown. If not harvesting your personal data wasn&#x27;t part of the deal, personal data will be harvested.<p>That you paid money is irrelevant.

The restriction on the number of articles is how the news publishers incentivize subscriptions -- subscribing unlocks more articles per week&#x2F;month&#x2F;whatever. They are going to advertise either way.<p>Paper newspapers always had ads too. Subscribers didn&#x27;t get a different version of the paper without the ads. Ads have been a deeply ingrained part of the news business for over 100 years and they aren&#x27;t going to stop now.

As said: &quot;The fact that you pay for subscription, doesn&#x27;t mean you aren&#x27;t the product for publishers to advertisers&quot;

I had to close two pop ups to read this article. So there&#x27;s that.

In a nutshell: Because they make more money that way.

What rights does paying for something ever give you?

If newspapers could have a woeking business model without advertising I&#x27;m sure many would. The theory on the web is that if you take away ads for paid subscribers you&#x27;ll not be able to ever add them back. Personally a cheaper subscription with an ad-lite, or tracking-free(GDPR opt out style) experience and a full price subscription for no ads seems like a fair deal. Thoughts? Disclosure: I work at a comscore 50 publisher. We are currently ad only and designing a subscription product so feedback is very welcome and timely.

Hulu, to me, has the perfect model: limited content for free, full content with ads for a subscription fee, full content with no ads for a (slightly) higher subscription fee.

You’re paying for content not ad free. Maybe they will make us pay twice. Once for the service, then next level to remove ad.

To everyone making the obvious point: yes, obviously, there is potentially money to be made from this richer demographic. But that doesn&#x27;t explain why they have to make the ads so intrusive or site-breaking.<p>Remember, something stops Ferrari from blanketing the dash with ads. Why doesn&#x27;t that same dynamic apply here?

This type of thing is the thumbprint of management by sociopathy. &quot;Why does nobody subscribe to us and leave us so ad dependent!&quot; They cry. Just like complaints about lack of employee loyalty after they do stuff like layoffs to inflate quarterly earnings and look at pension funds as piggy banks and refuse to give raises. Then complain about people leaving for career advancement when they won&#x27;t even give Cost of Living raises. The same pattern regardless - do something for short term gain that creates a long term problem and try to pass the buck. And it wasn&#x27;t their fault because they were entitled to the short term gains. They are incapable of understanding why trying to get paid twice for the same thing is a bad thing or why you should never trust anyone who attempts that. To them trust is something they are entitled by position to regardless of how they mistreat people.<p>In my opinion the best thing to do with them in response is banish them. Don&#x27;t invest in them or patronize them as much as possible as they are clearly out to screw you over. If you are in management of a position to do so oust them as soon as possible. Sadly they are a goddamn plague and hard to oust.

Because you are still paying for news even though you are seeing intrusive ads.

(2017)

Because free markets don’t always produce ideal outcomes for consumers.

&gt; Of course, you only get a limited number of free articles per month if you don’t subscribe.<p>Wait until the author learns about clearing cookies.

What if your paid subscription is only covering a portion of the service and the full price is subsidized by the ads?

Imagine a pair of augmented reality glasses, capable to filter all ads shown to you. A layer to end all layers.

I pay for nyt. They still played annoying video ads. So I removed their app; I access it via Firefox.

Shareholder&#x27;s demand insane growth every quarter. Can&#x27;t leave money on the table.

I pay for Ars Technica, definitely wouldn’t if paying didn’t disable the ads.

The very publication you’re subscribing to also shows ads to it’s print subscribers. I don’t think ther was ever an implicit promise that subscriptions remove ads, I’m not even sure why you’d expect that from a publication that’s been doing it that way for decades...

&quot;By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing…kill yourself. It’s just a little thought; I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they’ll take root – I don’t know. You try, you do what you can.&quot; --Bill Hicks

Why do you still pay for that stupidity?